The Night Watch - Cultural Legacy

Cultural Legacy

• The work has inspired musical works in both the classical and rock traditions, including the second movement of Gustav Mahler's 7th Symphony, the lyrics of King Crimson's "The Night Watch" by Richard Palmer-James, and Ayreon's "The Shooting Company of Captain Frans B. Cocq" from Universal Migrator Part 1: The Dream Sequencer.
• Alexander Korda's 1936 biographical film Rembrandt depicts the painting, shown in error in its truncated form, as a failure at its completion, perceived as lampooning its outraged subjects.
• King Crimson's song The Night Watch on their 1974 album Starless and Bible Black references the painting in relation to the decadence of the society behind, disinterested in the work of soldiers who defend the country "wracked by spanish wars". The last verse speaks of rich men who try to communicate to the masses through "the painter's brush".
• In Jean-Luc Godard's 1982 film, Passion, The Night Watch is reenacted with live actors in an opening shot. Godard explicitly compares his film to Rembrandt's painting, describing them both as "full of holes and badly-filled spaces." He instructs the viewer not to focus on the overall composition, but to approach his film as one would a Rembrandt and "focus on the faces."
• The Night Watch is a major plot device in the eponymous 1995 film, Night Watch. In the film the painting is stolen.
• The Night Watch is the subject of a 2007 film by director Peter Greenaway called Nightwatching, in which the film posits a conspiracy within the musketeer regiment of Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch, and suggests that Rembrandt may have immortalized a conspiracy theory using subtle allegory in his group portrait of the regiment, subverting what was to have been a highly prestigious commission for both painter and subject. His 2008 film Rembrandt's J'Accuse is a sequel or follow-on, and covers the same idea, using extremely detailed analysis of the compositional elements in the painting; in this Greenaway describes The Night Watch as (currently) the fourth most famous painting in the Western world, after the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.